Month: March 2017

If you can look past some of the social stigmas of being an avid LinkedIn user, you’ll find that LinkedIn is actually the most powerful asset for any B2B entrepreneur or salesperson.

Nowhere else in the world has such focused, social data on people you are looking to sell to. With more than 460 million profiles, this social network can prove a goldmine for salespeople, as long as they know how to use it right. With that in mind, here are 11 overlooked LinkedIn hacks to get more out of your social selling efforts:

1. Find windows of opportunities.

LinkedIn gives you valuable real-time data on your prospects. It tells you when they post, when they’ve switched jobs, when they have a birthday, when they get a promotion, when they are out of work and more.

Use these triggers strategically and take advantage of optimal windows of opportunities. If a prospect just posted something 10 minutes ago, you know they are likely by their phone or computer with a window of downtime. This is the perfect time to give them a call.

If they got promoted or moved companies, send them a letter. If they just liked a post about the Cavs win last week, bring it up during your next call with them. Scan for opportunities at every corner.

6. Contact followers and fans.

If you’ve provided a service or have a great case study with a certain company, go to its LinkedIn company page and see its followers. This can be a great place to do cold prospecting, as people generally only follow companies on LinkedIn in which they have an actual interest. Using this mutual interest as an icebreaker could be a great in with new accounts.

Graduating and heading into the workforce can be challenging. Networking, applying to jobs, interviewing — it’s a stressful process. Rather than email blasting your resume to dozens of employers, however, take your time, do your research and apply for only the most attainable jobs.

Luckily, LinkedIn has done some of this research for you. By examining LinkedIn profiles of millions of recent grads across the U.S., the business social network has uncovered the top 10 companies hiring entry-level employees and the most popular positions.

Major financial firms Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PwC were found to hire the most recent grads. With offices around the world, and a number of different departments, these firms are always on the lookout for fresh hires. Don’t worry if you’re not a finance major either — many of these companies seek students with non-finance majors for jobs that don’t necessarily involve crunching numbers all day.

Amazon and Oracle are also great career paths for young people heading into the workforce. Tech companies are always seeking some new creatives to join their teams. Plus — there’s plenty of room for growth at such large companies.

LinkedIn continues to roll out its newest desktop version, and like it or not, if you haven’t been “upgraded” to the new interface, it will be coming your way soon.

Some people question why they changed something that was working just fine. Others complain they now are required to pay for what was free, or pay more just to keep some of the things they liked, as features continue to migrate to higher and higher levels of plans. Premium users complain some features have gone away completely, even though they had been paying for them.

Many longtime LinkedIn users who were quite happy until recently now hope for another social media site to emerge to compete with the giant of business networking. Until some meaningful competition shows up, however, here are some pointers to help you adjust to the new LinkedIn desktop interface.

What’s where in the navigation bar? The old navigation bar features and menus are largely present, but many are in different places. For example, the old Home, My Network and Jobs tabs are still found at the top of the main page. But your Profile has been relocated to the “Me” drop-down menu under your picture. And Interests has been relocated to either the “More” or “Work” drop-down, depending on your membership level.

If you’ve relied on LinkedIn to find alumni from colleges or universities you’ve attended, you may be surprised to see that this is nowhere to be found on the top of the main page. However, it is still around if you go to: www.linkedin.com/alumni.

2) Hidden advanced search. You could click on “advanced search” right next to the main search box at the top of the home page in the old LinkedIn. Now, in order to do an advanced search, simply click on the magnifying glass icon inside the search box, and it opens up. You’ll then be able to select a search based on People, Jobs, Posts, Companies, Groups or Schools on the top menu, and along the right side of the page you can utilize many (but not all) of the old standby search filters.

3) Building your network. LinkedIn continues to send mixed messages about how you are to build your network. On one hand, you are supposed to connect only with those people you know, but on the other hand it no longer asks how you know someone when you are sending an invite to link up, and it no longer gives you the option of adding a personal message when you hit “connect” to someone in its list of “People You May Know.”

And, while you can still decline to accept an invite, the only option is to simply decline. The “report invite as spam” option is gone. You can still go out of your way to report a spam invite, but without the convenient button, everyone knows that the likelihood of you doing so is minimal. There is an unmistakable unspoken message: “Go ahead and link up with anyone you choose!”